That’s the question asked here.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more that science fiction has taken a bit of a turn to the right. I’ve also seen more than a few reviews lambasting those authors for their views — which seems to matter not a whit to their sales.
So I emailed four of them — two relative newcomers and two legends — and asked why.
The legends, Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card, need no introduction. But it bears mention that Ender’s Game, Card’s best-known work, is on the Commandant of the Marine Corps recommended reading list as a treatise on what it means to be a leader. The newcomers, Lt. Col Tom Kratman (Ret.) and Larry Correia, both write for Baen.
I think its interesting, though I think the post is conflating the ideas of conservatism and the ideas of libertarianism which are not the same thing despite the occasionally overlapping Venn diagram. I also think there’s really no “trend” insofar that there’s always been a really strong libertarian streak in SF.
However Mr.Card (hailing from the far conservative side of that Venn diagram) does give a quip worthy of William F. Buckley Jr.
“Back when I cared,” he continued, “most of the writers of my generation were so extremely leftist in their formal opinions, and so extremely elitist in their practices, that it would be difficult to discern where they actually stood on anything. It’s as if the entire Tsarist aristocracy fervently preached Bolshevism even as they oppressed their peasants. But that view is based on observations back in the mid-1980s. Since then, my only exposure to their views has been the general boycott of mine. In short,” he said, “I’m their Devil, but I have no idea who their God is anymore.”
UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond in the comments says exactly my point:
SF is not a conservative literature at all, but it gets mistaken for one because libertarianism is wired deep into its DNA. In fact, it is structurally *impossible* for SF to be conservative! I have explained this in depth, with references, in my essay A Political History of SF.
The “rightward drift” is SF’s fundamental libertarianism asserting itself as left-wing gatekeepers in the establishment media become less able to suppress it. People who mistake this as a reassertion of conservatism are revealing their own confusion about the ways conservatism and libertarianism are mixed in their thinking.
